Bay of Pigs Invasion

I flew to manila yesterday morning, this would probably be my last trip for the year, that is if nothing comes up before december ends. I did a flight count and when I fly back home on Wednesday, it’ll be my 22nd plane flight this year and still I hadn’t rode one that ended up on a plane crash or had some terrorist on board, better luck next year.

I arrived in manila around 7:30 in the morning and it was a very fine daybreak.

I took a cab to my hotel and the cab’s FM station was tuned to 105.1 which played great jazz songs, I didn’t know if the driver was into the same music that I am but I ‘d rather save him that question else it’ll probably end us both in some dumb conversation which would ruin that fine sunday morning.

I got to my hotel around eight, I felt like if I were at home I would still be dozing off at this hour on a sunday morning. Blame it on the mood brought by that fine morning and the jazz station from the taxi cab but I just got four bottles of beer and thought about drinking til the next hour or when the sun rises a little higher. I had a long way to commute after that so I felt I’d probably loose the alcohol in my head while on the road and after I grab breakfast, I didn’t get to finish the last bottle though, I saved it for lunch.

Edward and imer were both busy on a sunday night so I ended up having beers with keloyd and I sure did get wasted. Keloyd was wearing this white shirt with a red silhouette of this local boxer who’s on fire at the moment, his shirt grabbed my attention because earlier I was working on samples that had the same red silhouette. I didn’t like this boxer a lot but nonetheless I gave his ugly mug a shot by just placing small orders of those shirts to see if anybody did give a crap about him, though I decided the red silhouette on black shirts. Keloyd told me that he’s fond of wearing shirts with icon personalities on them.

Over lunch today I was still pondering about the market of people who would wear shirts with icon personalities when it reminded me about this guy I met at work about two weeks ago who wanted to place orders for fidel castro shirts. This guy is american and he goes by the name sistilio and he’s some spanish professor in ucla or berkeley or those bigger universities in california, he was wearing a white shirt with his country’s president in some wanted sign like you see in the old west. Sistilio was also busy picking out che guevarra shirts whose mug was a more popular fashion statement here, and while he was at it, he started talking with thin air in spanish which mine was already dog crap but I think it was some grand speech from che. It also dawned to me sistilio is so mad about latin american revolutionaries, he did look like a veteran of the bay of pigs invasion himself and I could have asked him about it but I felt like he was going to give one goddam discussion about revolutionary idealism being the professor that he is. And I was also wondering why he is shopping for castro and guevarra shirts here when latin america is more closer to california and I continued to think what even the hell he is doing here in the first place. One guess I have is because my country is a great example of spanish heritage gone wrong, since sistilio is teaching spanish anyway.

I knew some shirt factory abroad whom I know printed castro shirts, I phoned the place to find out that they were no longer printing castro’s mug. I apologized to sistilio, he didn’t mind though and I had to go ask him.

“you’re buying fidel castro shirt’s because he’s going to die soon?”

Last time I saw castro on tv, he looked a lot more older and feeble in a hospital bed.

“everybody dies, that’s one truth”

I was going say the same thing about taxes but I didn’t anyway, I never wanted to ask him in the first place but I guess I was just looking for some goddam intelligent conversation.

疲勞

They had to wake me up at 8 in the morning yesterday, I wanted to sleep more because I had an appointment with some sales agent later around 10 but my parents were arriving from cebu at 8:30 so I had to drive and pick them up at the airport and it was one of those terrible mornings that I wanted to go on sleeping and wished that my parents could have just hired some driver or they could have taken the taxi home. Anyway I drove to the airport with one of our housekeepers to help my parents with their luggage whom I wished could have learned how to drive himself, I sure did get to the airport before 8:30 and hell for crying out loud my father then called that their flight got delayed and they won’t be arriving till 9. Half an hour was so much of time yet all I can do is sit in the airport carpark field and drink this cup of coffee I brought which I didn’t have time to drink at home.

I got to work right in time to meet this sales agent at 10 in the morning, he’s working for around four of our bigger suppliers and I knew was going to have a very long matter to attend to for the rest of the day with him, and hell it took me up to 6 in the afternoon to wrap everything up.

This sales agent is in his mid forties though a lot of his hair had turned white and he sounds like pretty much like a nice guy though he was making good lies in a straight face, like there was this time he asked to be excused because he wanted to take a leak and instead he came back to the office smelling like cigarettes and I was sure he smoked, he stood beside me while I wrote and he hummed this happy and silly tune that filled the air around me with traces of nicotine from his breath, and the goddam tune annoyed me that I had to change tables to work in peace, and hell he just had to follow me and hum some more. I had to start some stupid conversation with him to get his mouth to stop humming and talk about something else which I wouldn’t be listening anyway. I told him that there was this president of some company he used to work in who visited me some 2 days ago, it did stop him from humming though and he muttered the president’s guy name and he looked like he was happy he got fired from that company or something.

This guy’s former employer did come to see me some 2 days ago, he was some tall thin guy whom everybody would want to pull out a handshake with him because he’s the president of some company they probably never knew anyway, I just gave a short talk with el presidente here to amuse him for about ten minutes but the bleeding truth is, his company is doing slow in the market, and there was this one year that his company didn’t even send samples or anything that I thought this company has gone down the drain. Before he left he gave me his calling card, half of what were written were his contact numbers and on the other half was this coat of arms that he probably want people to know that he’s from the order of suchlike knighthood or whatever secret society other than him being el presidente, not much of a phony but lost his card though.

I was dead tired after what I had to work through yesterday, it was a saturday night though but I wanted to get sleep early. Raymund smsed me on my mobile phone a little before nine asking me if I could accompany him to this bar at 11 later because there was this dj who’s going to play that night whom he was mad about, he didn’t have anybody to ask around, his girl wasn’t around too so he was bugging me to go. A couple of beers would be great to end the day but what I was so keen about is because he wanted to meet at 11 which I felt was quite late. I wanted to do raymund his favor anyway and I stayed with him til around 1 in the morning while he listened to this dj play, which for me his music sounded pretty much like the music I hear on any other saturday night, as if the dj was only there for looks and for drunk bar flies to yell and cheer at.

The 5th of November

Remember, remember, the 5th of November
The Gunpowder Treason and plot
I know of no reason why Gunpowder Treason
Should ever be forgot

This was from some ode they made up for this british revolutionary guy fawkes which I've heard from this movie v for vendetta that I saw earlier this year (guy fawkes, yes we all do), the protagonist in the movie wore a smiling guy fawkes mask and was his role model because he wanted to blow something up on november the 5th which fawkes wanted to do, nothing blew up today in this part of the globe though. One thing that drew me to watch this vendetta movie is because it is an adaptation of an alan moore comic book, and most alan moore comic books that made it to the big screen were great, like john constantine and the concept of the league of extraordinary gentlemen, but vendetta wasn’t as good, it was like some brainwash movie for potential rebels to come out to mutiny.

I’m not a big fan of moore’s work but I do have the violator set of comic books he wrote, I got them when I was in high school and took me most of my dough for those stuff, but it was pretty good though, I don’t get bored reading those comic books over again every so often.

My classmates from manila were also here in my hometown for the weekend and I got everybody wasted last night over beer at jason’s restaurant, it was fun, they loved the place because the ambience was peaceful and they said the music sounds like starbucks, well you don’t get drunk over at starbucks often.

On Dust

"on dust" is just a homonym from which the slang for the day of the dead in my country sounds like, which is today. It might ring a bell to some though rather than my previous post's title which was a lot confusing and I felt anybody could have hardly made that one out. Anyway the day of the dead is one of the few days I don’t get to work and since I was going to get a day off, I decided to buy a couple of beers during lunch break yesterday should I wish to enjoy the rest of today. I got to some mall grocery about three blocks from the office and shopped for my supply of alcohol.

The day of the dead in our country is pretty much a one day retreat of the living to the graveyards, so the groceries were kind of full because people were buying foodstuff they will be eating above graveyards while worms are also eating their dead relatives six feet below the ground. Anyway I got my grocery basket, loaded it with beers and lined my way out of the place. There was lady in front of me unloading her cart of grocery items to the counter, she had her little girl sitting and facing me from behind her shopping cart, she was a cute little girl I’d say around three or two and she held this coke in a plastic bottle by both hands, she stared at me and she looked like she was sorry for something. She stared at me then stared at my basket of beer bottles for a while then stared at her coke bottle, she went staring at me again and this time she looked confused and held her coke tighter. If she could have been older a bit she could have gone asking me what the hell those in my basket are. I could have told her it was beer to make her stop looking so goddam sorry maybe about my liver or something.

My father and brothers were in manila so I went to the graveyards alone around noon today, I thought it was a good time to visit because I felt the great mass of the living couldn’t stand the heat at this time of the day and most of them must have fled. I first visited my grandfather and my great grandmother’s grave and then dropped by this friend’s grave who shot himself in the head some three months ago, nobody was around so I stood there for a while staring at the date on this tombstone reading: died august 14 2006 and when I thought I was alone I saw his mother sitting by the shade, I went up to her and said hi and it almost made her son alive for a moment seeing me there, I went back home soon after because the high noon heat could have dried my brains out and drove me nuts.

I spent the rest of the afternoon sleeping and woke up at five, I slept like a log because I don’t spend that much time in slumberland that much on regular days, anyway this late afternoon I visited another graveyard, this place is pretty much old and not much of the living do frequent the place, like the last dead person who got buried here was already 20 years ago and probably the last person who could remember them is also dead in some other graveyard. I brought along four candles only to remember that I have five dead relatives buried in this place, I lost count because I haven’t met most of my dead in this graveyard in my lifetime. Almost all the tombstones in this graveyard are broken, and most of them had weeds and molds growing over the edges and had a candle or two around it like somebody left them burning in a hurry. Hell there was even a lost graveyard goat grazing in this place, it was walking around sniffing some grass that grew in the cracks in the pavement and Im sure it could have also gone away with some of the flowers placed for the dead. The goat could just have had a kin buried in this place too, or it could have been somebody who got reincarnated inside the poor animal that it was checking out on its own tombstone for candles.

It made you feel hell creepy walking around this place at sunset.

"I hope to hell when I do die somebody has enough sense to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetery."

Holden Caulfield